Medical, dental, pharmaceutical, veterinary or mortuary instruments and devices that are exposed to blood or other body fluids require thorough cleaning and microbial decontamination or sterilization between each use. Liquid microbial decontamination systems are now widely used to clean and deactivate the microorganisms on instruments and devices that cannot withstand the high temperatures of a steam sterilization system. Liquid microbial decontamination systems typically operate by exposing the medical devices and/or instruments to a liquid disinfectant or sterilization composition, which may contain strong oxidants such as peracetic acid.
In such systems, the instruments or devices to be cleaned are typically placed within a chamber within the liquid microbial decontamination system, or in a container that is placed within the chamber. During a decontamination cycle, a liquid disinfectant is then circulated through a liquid circulation system that includes the chamber (and the container therein).
Following the decontamination cycle, a rinse solution, typically water, is circulated through the chamber to remove traces of the decontaminated microbial content and any particulate that may have accumulated on the instruments or devices during the decontamination cycle. It is important to have rinse water of high purity to ensure that the microbially decontaminated instruments and devices do not become re-contaminated during the rinse cycle.
The water used to rinse the instruments and devices generally passes through a filtration system to remove microorganism-related particulates from the water. However, filtration systems that are capable of filtering viruses are usually not used with liquid microbial decontamination systems. Thus, there is a possibility that a virus may pass through the filtration system and be introduced into the chamber during a rinse cycle.
The present invention overcomes these and other problems and provides a decontamination system for decontaminating viruses in water used in a microbial decontamination system.